All I wanted to have was a drop down box that when the option was changed to a particular kind of equipment, it would bring back (through some AJAX-y goodness) the last 10 pieces of equipment in that category.

I was only working on the functionality of it at this point. The look and wording of it will change before it gets on the site.

After a few minutes I had it working. Not to difficult. Using AJAX to dynamically change the page on an ‘onChange’ event with the drop down box brought back the last 10 pieces of equipment.

It worked, but on closer examination I saw a problem. Since equipment in our database is uploaded in bulk, the last 10 machines are always from the same company, sometimes even 10 of the same model with slightly different specs. What I decided I really wanted was the last 10 machines from 10 different companies.

And THAT is harder than it sounds. For several reasons ‘Select DISTINCT’ can not be used and I hunted around the internet for a while and could find nothing that would help me they way I wanted. I was finally able to consult with our company’s sometimes hanging around .NET programmer (I hate .NET) and he recommended the ‘UNION’ function of SQL.

This sounded like a duct tape solution if I ever heard of one, but it does work.

This works by getting a list of the last 10 companies to update in the category you are working with. Then do a series of ‘Select TOP 1 *’ statements for each company that you then ‘UNION’ together to make the results look like one statement.

For example…

Select Top 1 {COL} from {TABLE} where company = {FIRST COMPANY} UNION Select Top 1 {COL} from {TABLE} where company = {SECOND COMPANY} UNION

And so on. You need to keep count of your UNIONS thought, because when you get to the 10th company, you don’t want to end your statement with ‘UNION’ because it will error out. So you pull out the good old

i = 0
i = i +1
While i < 10


We’ve all used some for of that code block no matter what language you are using to program, but it ended up not working here. It turns out that for some pieces of equipment, the items are so industry specific that there aren’t 10 different dealers. That means that the code errors out before the end of the SQL statement because there is nothing left to select.

So what needs to be done here is something along these lines….

SQL = 'Select TOP 1 {COL} from {TABLE} where company = {RECORDSET.COMPANY}'

while not RECORDSET.EOF
SQL = SQL & ' UNION '
SQL = SQL & 'Select TOP 1 {COL} from {TABLE} where company = {RECORDSET.COMPANY}'
RECORDSET.MOVENEXT
WEND

What happens here is that the SQL Statement is fired and then it checks to see if there are anymore companies. If so, it adds the UNION tag and the next SQL Select. When there are no more companies to bring equipment back from, it ends the statement and there is no error.

Since RECORDSET.COMPANY should be the last 10 companies that updated, the Select statement won’t bring back more than 10 records before it gets to the end.

Of course, that couldn’t be the final problem. Apparently, there are a lot of apostrophe’s in the company names, so it took a few minutes to figure out how to get the REPLACE function to work in this situation, but that wasn’t that big of a deal.

Here is a link to the working version of my code.

http://www.constructionequipmentguide.com/ajax.asp

When I get back to work, I will flesh this out with more accurate code descriptions
.

1999 was the year my company finally realized it needed to be on the web in some way. I had started to suggest the idea to them in 1996 and they put up a cursory contact information page in 1998, but it wasn’t until ‘99 that they decided to actually try and create a presence. 

I mean, who was I that they would listen to anyway. I was a graphic designer and had been here for less than a year, and the web was still so unknown to to most people and companies.

But ‘99 changed all that and we solicited bids from ‘Web Development Companies’. Companies that would handle all aspects of the design from graphics creation, HTML page building and any backend programming that needed to be done.

What we had decided we wanted was to put our newspaper online. We needed an editorial section that would hold that days stories and an archive, and a used equipment section that would consist of a search engine for the equipment and detail pages for each machine.

Well, we ended up with several bids that went from 13,000 all the way up to 100,000 and my company was not prepared for these numbers to say the least.

So I took my shot. I told them I could do it, and they actually believed me.

I still remember the call from my boss over the weekend asking if I thought I would really be able to handle it and I said of course I could (Not mentioning that I had never built a page in my life), and he said that when I came in on Monday, I was no longer to work on the publication, and that my full time job was going to be creating the website. 

They did contract the cheapest of the companies to do some backend programming and with them we launched the site in early 2000, and it was probably the busiest, most stressful time of career to that point. But I loved it.

With the exception of one piece of VB Script that I still use, I had re-written all of the code myself within the next 2 or 3 years, and continually updated the look, changed and added features as needed and rolled out updates on a daily or weekly basis for the next 8 years.

But now its happening again. It’s time for us to move forward and re-build from the ground up, and I’m getting that feeling again. I stressed and REALLY busy. It’s time to add things to the site that I have never built before.

I have been asked to stop the incremental updates to the site. To be honest I have been asked to stop doing anything to the site, and now have a month and a half to deliver the look and basic functionality of a new website and 5 other web related products. Including new admin sections, newsletters, and a video library that can do everything that a service like Brightcove can do, but built in house by me.

And then I have another month or so after to make it all work.

It will still be an ASP/SQL site. I hate .NET and moving to PHP/MySQL isn’t in the cards. Although I do have a PHP version of the site that mirrors the functionality of the active site. I’m sure it’s because of my knowledge of ASP vs PHP, but I can’t get the PHP site to work as fast or as well as the ASP version.

It will of course try to be standards based, having tables only where necessary, and I will use this as an opportunity to add some AJAX-y goodness to the site where appropriate. 

And Flash, with the video comes a lot of Flash. We shall see how that goes, but it will be interesting and I’ll report on it here.

After 12 years of the same company, this could be exactly what the complacent designer needs to get in gear.

Am I way off here?

Humboldt County Review

Then She Found Me review.

Was Neil Patrick Harris drunk at the premiere?

When you are written about as much as Steve Jobs is, you can’t help but rehash some information, but it was a good read never the less.

The ‘mod’ function is best explained as the remainder of a division problem. 28/9 = 3 Remainder of 1 or put another way 28/9 = 3 with a ‘mod’ of 1.

Using that information, we can tell our code to do something different when it hits a certain record in the database. For example, if you are populating a table, and you don’t know how many records are currently in the database, you might use the ‘mod’ function to create a new row automatically after every 5 records.

Say we have a list of companies that we want to present in columns, but at any one moment I don’t know how many records are in the database, but I do know that I don’t want to have a column be more than 10 companies deep.

Here is how we might tackle that problem.

<table id="companies">
<tr><td>

<%
i = 1

do until rs.eof
cellString = "<p>" & rs("Company") & "</p>"

if not i mod 10 = 0 then
response.write(cellString)
else
response.write(cellString)%> </td><td> <%
end if

i = i + 1

rs.movenext
loop

%>

</td></tr>
</table>

What is happening in the code is that we are initially setting i = 1 and then outputting the first company name in a <p> tag. We then loop through the code and add 1 to i before each new loop until we get to the 10th record, because only at the 10th record does the remainder or ‘mod’ = 0.

And then at that point, we insert the company’s name but we also drop in </td><td> to close the current cell and start a new one, in effect creating a new column.

You will note that the opening and closing <td> tags need to be outside of the code or your table format will be all screwed up.

And you can easily change the number of rows in your column by changing mod = 10 to how ever many rows you would like. ie. mod = 20, mod = 30. Other ways to use ‘mod’ with minor changes to the above code would be to create new rows when needed, or using ‘mod’ to see if you are in an even or odd numbered row to possibly alternate the colors of rows.

This Week in Photography

I first found out about the show on the MacBreak Weekly podcast and couldn’t recommend it more. It has rekindled my photography bug and prompted me to join the TWIP Flickr group to promote more interaction.

So, check it out.

This is what we have now…

http://www.cegltd.com/ 

and this is where I have started to go with it…

http://www.cegltd.com/new_front.asp 

Yeah, we are still working in ASP. I actually wrote a PHP version of the page, but the dynamic image resizing was horrendous. You can take a look here if you like.

I realize my proficiency in ASP is much greater but thats a huge load time difference.

If anyone has any comments or notices any problems - please - let me know.